Many people are familiar with the "personals" section of many newspapers. The personals are advertisements placed by people who would like to meet other people with similar likes and interests. People place personal advertisements in newspapers to find activity partners, to make new friends, to make acquaintances or to find people with whom intimate relationships may be formed.
Various types of publications print personals, including newspapers and magazines. The method by which a personal ad is placed and/or responded to can vary. For example, a telephone system may be employed to place ads which are then printed in a newspaper or magazine. Responses to personals may be telephone responses in the form of recorded voice messages which are stored for retrieval.
Some publications (referred to herein as the "client") enlist the services of another organization (referred to herein as the "vendor"), such as Tele-Publishing, Inc., the Assignee of the subject invention, for the purpose of collecting and processing personal ads and providing the text of the ads in a convenient form for publication. The vendor operates a plurality of computers, referred to as call centers, to which telephone access is provided. A call center operator, or ad taker, answers telephone calls from individuals seeking to place ads (referred to herein as "advertisers") and enters the text of the personal ads onto the computer, along with other information, such as information identifying the advertiser.
In one system in which responses to personal ads are recorded voice messages, the vendor maintains a plurality of computers (referred to herein as ad response machines) on which the responses are recorded on a voice recording media. The ad response machines are located remotely relative to the vendor and more locally with respect to the clients in order to reduce the cost of placing telephone call responses. The ad taker provides the advertiser with a voice mail box, including a box number and a security code, with which telephone access to the responses is achieved. More particularly, the box number identifies a portion of the voice recording media on which responses to the advertiser's personal ad are stored and the security code ensures that the party accessing such responses is authorized to do so.
As a result of the popularity of personals advertisements in newspapers, and the advent of the Internet's World Wide Web, systems for providing personals advertisements on networked computer systems have appeared. These personals systems may be made available to the public through software applications known as Web browsers which are used to locate resources on the World Wide Web.
To date, however, these systems for providing personals on computer networks consist largely of the same information that is available in the newspaper advertisements. That is, the computerized personals merely mimic the newspaper advertisements. Conventional systems for providing personals advertisements on computer networks do not take advantage of the expanded capabilities of computer networks to track and coordinate information regarding personal contacts. With newspaper personals, one might simply circle interesting advertisements for future reference. Similarly, a person who responds to such advertisements might track his or her responses by writing down information about each such response on paper or in a "little black book." Personals systems that operate over computer networks fail to improve upon these manual systems.